Tech talks that'll change how you think

It’s not that often that I go to a conference or watch a talk on YouTube that
truly changes the way I think about programming or software development. Even
though I’m someone who does frontend development for a living, most of the
talks that were most illuminating for me are talks that are either
language-agnostic or unrelated to my daily work.

Here are a few of the best talks I’ve ever seen on programming or the field
of technology. If you have an amazing one you think I’m missing, feel
free to tweet it to me @monicalent.

One of my all-time favorite talks (although technically a talk about math
rather than programming), Dr. Eugenia Cheng explores how category theory
maps onto life and how we can use category theory to understand the world
around us. She covers topics ranging from privilege to war and back to math.
Or “maths” as she calls it :wink: You will love it!

This talk is easily in my top three favorite talks of all time. It’s an ironic
look at terrible programming practices that can make you un-fire-able as a
developer in your company. Stuart references everything from Java to
ActiveRecord, with concrete examples of poor programming choices. You will
laugh and you’ll learn!

By Rich Hickey, inventor of Clojure and founder of Datomic – @richhickey

Who doesn’t cite “Simple Made Easy” as one of their favorite talks? Here
Rich Hickey talks about the difference between things that are simple
and things that are easy. You’ll walk away with a different perspective
you can use to make technical choices. I re-watch this talk annually and
get something new out of it every time.

This talk is the most hands-on practical talk in the list, which explains
practical OOP pitfalls with real code. Sandi Metz is a fantastic and engaging
speaker, and you will take something away from this talk that you can apply
straight into code on your next working day.

I saw this talk at Lambda World in Spain, and it was easily the most stand-out
talk of the whole conference. David Nolen talks about his experience
maintaining ClojureScript. If you’re a frontend developer curious about
alternative ways to work with React, as well as what it’s like to maintain
an open source project over a long period of time, you will enjoy this talk.

Julia talks about building a profiler for Ruby, and how she assumed that
if it had been worth doing then someone else would’ve already done it.
If you want to be encouraged to write code and build useful things, you’ll
surely enjoy this talk which is delivered in a very fluid and light-hearted
way.

Finally a software architecture talk with a good mix of code and context,
that’s easy to grasp but not so trivial as to be meaningless. Gary talks about
the pitfalls of mocking and integration testing, figuring out where to
place boundaries in your application, and a practical look at how to implement
“functional core imperative shell”. Very useful no matter what programming
language or framework you’re using.

I’ve watched a lot of Bryan Cantrill’s talks, but this one particularly stood
out to me. I don’t want to spoil the talk with details, but it goes to show
that you can find interesting problems at all levels of the stack.